Much has been written about the Los Angeles riots of 1992, which brought out deep racial tensions throughout the city, exposed by media images of police brutality. This book sheds light on another facet of the events, the birth of a dynamic grassroots activist and community organizing movement that has been little noticed by academics or even by the press. It also focuses on the theatrical production of Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, a performance created by Anna Deavere Smith. Performance and Activism analyzes a rich, eclectic, and ongoing ensemble of local activist struggles in the context of the history and political economy of Los Angeles. Building on the important critical urban studies work of Mike Davis and Edward Soja, it also draws on Dwight Conquergood's writings on performance ethnography to theorize the political work of grassroots formations such as alternative/underground media collectives, gang truce parties/picnics, and women-organized prisoner support and court watch groups, such as Mothers Reclaiming Our Children. The book focuses on these events through the inter-disciplinary approach of performance studies, highlighting "performance-conscious activisms" that help bridge the enormous class, race, and gender divides of our society.

Performance and Activism: Grassroots Discourse after the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992 (Raya Dunayevskaya Series in Marxism and Humanism)

Afary, Kamran

Humor & Entertainment

Lexington Books

Much has been written about the Los Angeles riots of 1992, which brought out deep racial tensions throughout the city, exposed by media images of police brutality. This book sheds light on another facet of the events, the birth of a dynamic grassroots activist and community organizing movement that has been little noticed by academics or even by the press. It also focuses on the theatrical production of Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, a performance created by Anna Deavere Smith. Performance and Activism analyzes a rich, eclectic, and ongoing ensemble of local activist struggles in the context of the history and political economy of Los Angeles. Building on the important critical urban studies work of Mike Davis and Edward Soja, it also draws on Dwight Conquergood's writings on performance ethnography to theorize the political work of grassroots formations such as alternative/underground media collectives, gang truce parties/picnics, and women-organized prisoner support and court watch groups, such as Mothers Reclaiming Our Children. The book focuses on these events through the inter-disciplinary approach of performance studies, highlighting 'performance-conscious activisms' that help bridge the enormous class, race, and gender divides of our society.

Performance and Activism: Grassroots Discourse after the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992

Iranian Diaspora Identities: Stories and Songs combines oral history, storytelling, theories of communication, and performance studies into a unique study of an immigrant community. This book is the result of collaborative work between two Iranian-American immigrants, one a musician and artist and the other a professor. Using ethnographic, dramatistic, and oral history approaches, Ziba Shirazi gathered these stories of diaspora journeys of Iranians living in California and Toronto in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The editors transcribed these stories and developed them into short performance pieces that include lyrics and songs and were performed in the United States and Canada to thousands of people in theater venues and libraries. These stories constitute a unique archive of the history of contemporary Iranian diaspora experiences. They are autobiographic vignettes that have helped constitute an artistic vision of Iranian exiles' own sense of community and their migratory experiences that inform the transformations they experienced in family, gender, and spiritual beliefs. In addition to providing an archive of experiences, the book uses social drama and storytelling to advocate for a new methodology for documenting Iranian diaspora accounts. It constitutes a new contribution to the existing literature on Iranian diaspora and furthers an exciting contribution to scholarship in qualitative research in communication studies.

Iranian Diaspora Identities: Stories and Songs

Literature & Fiction

Shirazi, Ziba

Dramas & Plays

Hamilton Books

In the early twentieth century, a group of artists and intellectuals reinterpreted the Middle Eastern trickster figure Nasreddin in their periodical Mollā Nasreddin. They used folklore, visual art and satire to disseminate a consciously radical and social democratic discourse on religion, gender, sexuality and power in Transcaucasia and Iran. The periodical reached tens of thousands of people in the Muslim world, impacting the thinking of a generation. 
This highly-illustrated book explores the milieu in which Mollā Nasreddin was born, the way the periodical recreated the trickster trope, and the influence of European graphic artists, especially Francisco Goya, on the journal. It focuses on the most creative period, 1906-11, when the journal reflected the social and political concerns of three major upheavals: the 1905 Russian Revolution, the 1906–1911 Iranian Constitutional Revolution, and the 1908 Young Turk Movement.

Molla Nasreddin: The Making of a Modern Trickster, 1906-1911

Comics & Graphic Novels

Afary, Janet

History & Price Guides

Edinburgh University Press

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Books by Afary, Kamran